Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage

I hate to be wrong, and I hate that I am wrong so often in so many ways, that my thinking is often defensive, judgmental, and skittish. (I have a thinking disorder. I once took a 20 Questions quiz about drinking but substituted thinking and I got most of them: Do you prefer to think alone? Do you hide your thinking from loved ones? Has thinking beg

I’d like to know if God gives us points for showing up or simply marks us present.

I saw that I am heading (God willing) to a fat old age where I will have spent only twenty percent of any given day paying attention to life, to being where my feet are. The rest of the time will have been spent in the ticker tape of imaginings, a low-level fear about those I love, and the things I need to buy.

He said that when you first meet him, you’re meeting his bodyguard. I wrote it down and later taped it to my bathroom mirror, where all truth resides at least briefly. His bodyguard is smart and charming, and keeps people out. Deep inside, his true self is very human, which is to say beautiful and kind of a mess—needy, insecure, judgmental, like mo

This existential exhaustion is everywhere we look these days in our world, our nation, and in our beloved, maybe especially in our teenagers and our very closest friends.

Most of these prophets were introverts. Jesus definitely was. He’s never really doing all that much, if you think about it. He doesn’t even tell His own stories. He’d be fired from most churches today. He’s in a world of great fear, there’s evil, violence, and need all around him, so He often finds He needs time alone—in silence, in the desert, on

I want to contribute to the aquifer that runs underneath our communities, of people who have made peace with others against all odds, because that groundwater helps restore and sustain life.

The governess appeared, quiet as the grave, as is her wont and her domain, pretending her job is to keep me from dying, when actually it is to keep me from living, at least outside her control. We share the worry that I am secretly a loser, a latent embarrassment, even back in the day when I could still sneeze or cough without tiny bladder control

“He’s your friend,” she texted back. “He’s your friend that you get to sleep with and wake up with. That’s what married life is at its most basic. A friend, your teammate, a person you trust and look forward to talking to, about anything. Someone who seems to really, really like you, who you like, too.”